Eighteen teenagers. Seven life-changing weeks.

Every summer, the Royal Canadian Air Cadets offers its top cadets the chance to participate in an elite flight-training camp. As the Crow Flies follows a group of these young men and women as they undergo seven weeks of training to get their pilot’s license in an intense program that normally takes six to eight months.

Casting an especially affectionate and empathetic eye on her female subjects, filmmaker Tess Girard—herself a graduate of the program—creates a unique and intimate portrait of an extraordinary, yet also very recognizable, group of 17-year-olds as they come of age. As one cadet says, the program is “not only learning about flying, but also about how intricate everything is.”

When I was 17 years old, I took the same course that the teenagers in this film did. Flying at a young age taught me to see the world from a different perspective, as it did for these teenagers.

As the Crow Flies is not a film about flight. It is a film about discovering ourselves through personal achievement and new perspectives. Coming of age is not about becoming someone else or growing into someone new. It is about growing to understand the self in conjunction with our surroundings; embracing it in all its awkwardness, shortcomings, beauty, and potential.

There are very few sophisticated representations of teenagers in cinema. It’s an age group often regarded with a sense of loathing. Admittedly, I’ve wondered myself why I would ever want to make a film about an age in my life that I remember enduring rather than experiencing.

After spending a summer with these youth, I fell in love with them. I saw pieces of myself within them and empathized greatly with them. Just as flying gave these teenagers a shift in perspective, observing them gave me a new perspective on myself.

I was smitten with how excited they were over the simplest of things. I was taken with how they wanted to learn and experience everything new. I was humbled by their humility and warmed by their confidence. I was moved by how hard they tried to excel and how much they achieved at a young age — with little understanding of how special it was!

If we can spend a bit of time with these youth — watch them grow, watch them change, watch them see the world anew — we as an audience can get in touch with the teenager within and apply that spirit to our current lives. The version of us that isn’t afraid of the world, that’s willing to try new things, that’s thirsty for knowledge and willing to jump off the precipice.

Any person who says they’re worried about the next generation hasn’t met a teenager lately. Specifically, they haven’t met these teenagers.

We have much to learn from them.